VRC Exhibition | Perceiving Space: The Hal Box and Logan Wagner Collection of Mexican Architecture and Urban Design

Every summer from 1985 to 1996, with the assistance of volunteer teams from Earthwatch,  W.L. Moody, Jr. Centennial Professor Emeritus in Architecture and former dean of the School of Architecture Hal Box, F.A.I.A., and Dr. Logan Wagner explored, photographed, measured and made scale drawings of over ninety towns in Mexico; the collection of over 8,000 slides taken during this period was donated to the School of Architecture’s Visual Resources Collection (VRC).



The exhibition Perceiving Space: The Hal Box and Logan Wagner Collection of Mexican Architecture and Urban Design highlights a selection of images from a collection that documents communal open spaces built in Mexico from 2000 BC to the present, concentrating on the 16th and 17th century fusion of Mesoamerican and European architecture and town planning.  Contained in the collection are images of sacred open spaces formed by ancient pyramids and the plazas, atrios, cloisters and towns' central plazas.



In 2006 the VRC and Artstor, a digital library of nearly one million images, agreed to collaborate on a project to digitize and distribute images from the collection through the ARTstor Digital Library.  With generous support from ARTstor, graduate student Kristina Kupferschmid cataloged and selected almost 6,000 images for digitization from January 2007 through September 2008. The Hal Box and Logan Wagner Collection of Mexican Architecture and Urban Design will be available inARTstor in spring 2009 and as part of the VRC's Online Image Collection.